Mick Moloney, a recording artist, folklorist, concert host and teacher who championed traditional Irish culture and encouraged female instrumentalists in a field dominated by men, died Tuesday at his Manhattan home in Greenwich Village. He was 77 years old.
Glucksman House Ireland NYU, the New York University Center for Irish Studies, announced his death. No cause was given. Less than a week earlier, Mr. Moloney had performed at the Maine Celtic Festival in Belfast, Maine.
An immigrant from Ireland, Mr. Moloney was a pioneering scholar in the field of Irish-American studies at New York University, where he was named a World Distinguished Professor. The university houses his extensive collection of materials in its Irish America Archives. He reissued a great deal of 19th and 20th century Irish band music and brought the music to a wide audience whose familiarity with Irish culture often did not extend much beyond the commercialized St. Patrick’s Day events.
a superb musician, Mr. Moloney sang and played guitar, mandolin, and banjo, with the tenor banjo being his primary instrument. He was founder in 1978 of Green Fields of Americaan interdisciplinary Irish touring ensemble whose members include Michael Flatley, the founder of Riverdance, the stage show featuring Irish music and dance.
Mr. Moloney was passionate about exploring the connections between Irish, African, Galician and American roots music and organized many concerts and conferences highlighting those synergies. In a “Celtic Appalachia” series program he directed, presented in 2012 at Symphony Space in Manhattan by the Irish Arts Center, Malian musician Cheick Hamala Diabaté performed pre-banjo indigenous African instruments. Mr. Moloney also collaborated with Filipina vocalist Grace Nono, among other musicians.
from Mr Moloney research extended to the often troubled relationship between Irish Americans and African Americans in the XIX and XX centuries; when he died he was working on a movie called “Two paths diverged”, about how those communities found common ground through music and dance despite their antagonisms.
His scholarship also covered Irish-Jewish relations. In an entertaining recording called “If it wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews,” Mr. Moloney highlighted the vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley collaborations between these two immigrant groups in the United States. (One verse asked, “What would this great Yankee nation really do / If it wasn’t for a Levy, or a Monahan, or a Donohue?”)
Until the 1980s, Irish traditional music players were mostly men, but Mr. Moloney encouraged women to perform too, organizing a festival in Manhattan in 1985 called “Cherish the Ladies” (named after a Irish jig) and a concert the next day. year called “Fathers and Daughters”. He produced an album by the girl group Cherish the Ladies called “Irish Women Musicians in America.”
Mr. Moloney, who hosted programs about folk music on American public television, was honored by the Irish government in 2013 with the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service to Irish People Abroad. In 1999, Hillary Clinton, the first lady at the time, presented him with the National Heritage Grant, the nation’s highest honor in popular and traditional arts, awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Mr. Moloney mentored many subsequent NEA Fellows, including flutist Joanie Madden of Cherish the Ladies.
He wrote a 2002 book called “Far from the clover coast: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song” accompanied by a CD of songs. and he led regular trips to irelandhighlighting Irish culture through concerts, studio tours, castle tours and pub crawls.
“At the heart of the Irish American experience is a sense of displacement, from one country to another, from a rural to a more complicated way of life,” Moloney told The New York Times in 1996. “There is that sense of pulling from the other side of the ocean. There is a deep sense of loss.”
Michael Moloney was born in Limerick, in the southwest of Ireland, on November 15, 1944, one of seven children born to Michael and Maura Moloney. His father was the chief air traffic control officer at Shannon Airport, west of Limerick, and his mother was the principal of a primary school in Limerick.
Mick, as he was called, studied tenor banjo, mandolin, and guitar in his youth, becoming particularly drawn to the “wild sound” of the banjo after first hearing it in the 1950s, he said. Lacking opportunities to listen to traditional instrumental music in Limerick, she recalled, she would travel to nearby County Clare to listen to tunes in pubs and record them so she could learn them.
In his youth he played with the Emmet Folk Group and with the Johnstons, a close harmony folk band with whom he recorded and toured Europe and America. “Much of his personality comes from Mr. Moloney,” critic John S. Wilson wrote in The Times in 1971, “who has a charming and captivating gift of eloquence with which he deftly mixes wry humor and pointed commentary, punctuated by a wonderfully Mephistophelean eyebrow.”
Mr. Moloney received a BA in economics from University College Dublin and briefly lived in London as a social worker helping immigrant communities. He moved to the United States in 1973 and received a Ph.D. in folklore and popular life from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. In addition to NYU, he taught ethnomusicology, folklore, and Irish studies at the University of Pennsylvania and at Georgetown and Villanova.
In 1982, Mr. Moloney founded the Irish/Celtic Week at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, W.Va., modeled after the Willie Clancy Summer School, an annual event in County Clare that teaches traditional Irish arts.
In his last two decades, he lived in both Manhattan and Thailand, where he volunteered as a music therapist and teacher for abandoned children with HIV at the mercy center in Bangkok. He performed online from Thailand to Irish for Biden Presidential campaign events in 2020.
His marriages to Philomena Murray and Judy Sherman ended in divorce. His survivors include his partner, Sangjan Chailungka with whom he lived in Bangkok; a son, Fintan, from his marriage to Mrs. Murray; and four siblings, Violet Morrissey and Dermot, Kathleen, and Nanette Moloney.
While he devoted much of his career to academia, Mr. Moloney never lost his energy to make music, describing himself as an artist first and foremost.
“There are thousands of songs in the tradition, so when we sit down to rehearse, our job really isn’t to find material, it’s to exclude material, because we’d play them all if we could,” he said in a video. interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “On my tombstone,” she added, “I want the inscription of the banjo driver.”